Biography

The Short Version

(for blog posts, features, etc.)

A graduate of the Sunderman Conservatory at Gettysburg College, Kassandra Flamouri grew up telling stories through both music and prose. She currently resides in Pennsylvania, where she makes her living as a college prep tutor, digital marketer, and freelance editor.

The Long Version

(in case you're just interested...)

I started writing seriously in 2015, though I probably should have realized a lot sooner that I was meant to be a writer. Even as early as kindergarten, I struggled to pay attention in class because the outside world was just not as interesting as what was going on in my head. By that time, I had already made my storytelling debut ("Squirm the Worm," delivered at age three) and had spent countless hours playing make-believe with my 284 stuffed animals, every one of whom had a name and detailed backstory. Though I quickly learned to pay attention (or at least look like I was paying attention) during school hours, I retained a tendency to daydream and a love of stories.

When I left high school to attend the Sunderman Conservatory at Gettysburg College, I learned to translate both emotional and programmatic content into music as a composition major. I graduated in 2010 and entered an employment desert. I bounced around until I stumbled across an exam prep tutoring gig. No one was more shocked than I was to discover that I absolutely LOVED it. Turns out solving critical reading and math puzzles is actually fun when you're getting paid to do it. Even better, it gave me the the time and flexibility to really dig into writing. My short stories have appeared in various online and print literary journals, and I've released two novels, one by myself (The Chalice and the Crown) and one with Parliament House Press (Magissa).

What's In A Name?

If you’ve visited my short fiction page, you might have noticed that my early short stories were published under the pen name Tamara Linden. At the time, I thought there were too many Cassandra, Kass, and Cass’s out there, so I decided to go by my middle name, Tamara. After about a year, though, I realized that I hated being called Tamara (somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that people would actually be addressing me by my pen name), and I missed being me. So I reclaimed my identity, with a slight compromise. Kassandra Flamouri is as close as you can reasonably get to my full name, which is probably the longest, Greek-est thing you'll ever see. I've shortened my surname to just the root word, flamouri, which is the Greek name for trees of the genus Tilia. In many English-speaking countries, these trees are called lindens.